The new Raspberry Pi 2 will run Windows 10 and run Universal Apps

I'm a huge Raspberry Pi fan. I've got three around the house, I use one for a Media Center, one for 3D Printing, and one for messing about. Now I'm gonna get a BUNCH more as the Raspberry Pi 2 has been announcedand for a $35 computer that fits in your pocket this new version has some amazing things going for it.

• Still tiny! Same size as a Raspberry Pi B+. My cases will still work. ;)
• HDMI full sized! Ethernet! Camera port!
• Still uses Micro USB for power!
• BUT now it has...
  • A 900 MHz quad-core ARM Broadcom Cortex A7 with a BCM2836 system on a chip adds up to 3x to 6x the performance. Woof.
  • 1 GIG of RAM (shared with GPU)

I love using my Raspberry Pi as a "Dedicated Device." While it's clearly a general purpose computer, it's so cheap and powerful I'll use it for one thing and have it do that one thing well. Watch for water in my basement and text me if a sensor gets wet. A tiny Minecraft machine for my kids. A 3D Printing Print Server. A small games emulator. An open source media player.

And now it seems I'll be able to hack on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Windows 10 while I deploy a Universal Windows App!

Windows 10 is coming to the Raspberry Pi 2

Not only did the Raspberry Pi Foundation announce the Raspberry Pi 2, but it seems that Windows 10 will support Raspberry Pi 2 and we can get it free for the Maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT coming later this year. Last year Microsoft announced the Windows Developer Program for IoT and put Windows on the Intel Galileo board. Today Windows gets even better for IoT and Maker scenarios by supporting makers on RPi2.

Notice in the picture on the left there's a Surface Pro 3 running a Universal App. On the right is a Windows Phone also running that same Universal App. In the middle is the Raspberry Pi 2 (note there's no shell) and it's running a Universal App as well. I could make my little Raspberry Pi 2 a dedicated device that runs Windows 10 plus my App. I can write code for it using the same languages, tools and techniques that I already know.

It's pretty clear that the way to go with Windows 10 from a developer's perspective is Universal Apps. You get a great development experience, good API coverage, tooling that makes cross-compilation easy, and now you can go from Raspberry Pi 2, to Phones, Tablets, Xboxen, the cloud and beyond. I'm pretty geeked.

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